A gentle voice on human rights from Oslo

Endy M. Bayuni The Jakarta Post/Oslo

He greets his guests from Indonesia at his office in flawless Bahasa Indonesia, as if it is the language he speaks every day in Oslo. He is a soft-spoken individual whose disposition seems at odds with the complicated and harsh issues that he, and his center, deal with: human rights violations.

But then, Knut Asplund is no ordinary human rights campaigner and the Norwegian Center for Human Rights, of which he is an associate, is not one of those run-of-the-mill NGOs that is vocal, if not loud, in denouncing Indonesia's human rights record.

Pak Knut, as he is affectionately called by his Indonesian friends, prefers the softly-softly approach that is not necessarily less effective than the frontal and abrasive method preferred by most other human rights organizations.

Still, he politely avoided any comparison with the Western human rights organizations that have been poking their noses into Indonesia's rights records, and are thus better known to the Indonesian public than his own center.

"They do their job," he says. "We do our share."

Here, from his office opposite the University of Oslo, Asplund runs the Indonesian program with Christian Ranheim and Christina Kloster.

Asplund and his team are not complete strangers to Indonesian human rights or legal circles as visits to the country and contact with people who matter have been par for the course in their work.

Both articulate speakers of Bahasa Indonesia, the language skills of Asplund and Kloster testify to their deep involvement with this country.

The center's work in Indonesia has been substantial, but it has somehow escaped media publicity. Perhaps this is because it does not deliver press statements or regular reports passing judgment on Indonesia's human rights record.

The Indonesian program is much more to do with building the capacity of Indonesian institutions to ensure better protection and observation of human rights.

One of its new activities, for example, is helping to establish a library for human rights study centers in Indonesia. Asplund and his team are also helping to draft a textbook on human rights to be used in teaching undergraduates at law schools in the country.

The center has organized human rights courses for law professors, and arranged for selected Indonesians to undertake master's degrees related to human rights issues at the University of Oslo.

Human rights 'superpower'

The activities are not the sort of stuff that draws controversy and thus media attention. Most journalists would probably find them too dull to be newsworthy.

But they are important nevertheless in the realm of Indonesia's human rights field, an area in which the nation, the government in particular, continues to fall short.

For Norway, as it is with most other Scandinavian countries, human rights has become a major foreign policy issue, at times even the defining issue around which other aspects of bilateral relations are built.

"Norway is trying to find its place in international diplomacy, a niche," Asplund explains. "We want to become a sort of humanitarian superpower."

And human rights is the obvious choice for a country in which the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded each year. Norway's contribution to international peace includes the 1993 Oslo Agreement between Israel and Palestine. Norway has also been involved in the peace processes in Sri Lanka, the Southern Philippines and in Aceh in 2002.

Asplund shrugs when asked whether he or his center has powerful clout over the policy-making process of the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

But he admits that non-governmental organizations in Scandinavian countries have a lot of political clout.

"It's a Scandinavian model of government. There is a close relationship between civil society organizations and the government. Perhaps even too close, so that we have often been accused of being completely co-opted," he says, noting that Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Store was formerly the secretary-general of the Norwegian Red Cross.

The Indonesian program began in 2002 following the establishment of the Human Rights Dialog between the Indonesian and Norwegian governments. The human rights center was brought into the picture to help facilitate and implement some of the agreements that came out from the annual dialog.

Asplund, an anthropologist by training, applied for the job to lead the Indonesian program because of his connection with Indonesia. He wrote his master's degree thesis in 1995 on the relation between Islam and traditional beliefs in the Riau archipelago in 1995.

Hailing from a small village, as he put it "above the Arctic Circle", he returned to Indonesia in 1999 as a member of the independent observer for the East Timor ballot. He and Ranheim were among the last to leave East Timor before violence erupted.

That unfortunate episode remains an unresolved issue as far as the United Nations is concerned, particularly in the absence of anyone in the Indonesian Military being made accountable for the atrocities that took place in the wake of the UN-sponsored ballot.

"It's hard to disagree with the United Nations," Asplund says.

But he acknowledges that there has been a change of attitude on the part of Indonesia in recent years.

"There is a genuine effort to solve human rights problems," he adds.

He underlines specifically the ratification of the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by the Indonesian government this year as milestones for human rights in Indonesia.

"It's a statement of commitment," he said.

"There's a pronounced will to improve, and you find this across the government. There is openness now, including in the Indonesian Military."